


The Midnight Gospel

by Lastactiontricia



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 11:27:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30122061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lastactiontricia/pseuds/Lastactiontricia
Summary: Status: One ShotWritten for the @cabin-fever-bang prompt- Milkman Dean 1940’s AURating: THIS IS DARK. IT IS ABOUT SERIAL KILLERS AND MILKMEN.Character(s): Dean, OC LorWarnings: MURDER, as per usual foul language. Triggery but I don’t wanna spoil it.Author’s Note(s):  No one under 18, I’m not a babysitter.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Original Female Character(s)
Kudos: 1





	The Midnight Gospel

The Midnight Gospel

New Bern, North Carolina- 1947

Lor

Rain was beating its way through the sunshine, shaming a percussion line with the force it struck the ground. Lorelei Stevenson, Lor to whomever she could call a friend, watched it through the bluish haze of a forbidden cigarette, screen door open and protesting along the hinges where she’d toe it- open, shut, open, shut. It blocks out the scratching sounds that John claims is just mice. The crisp white of her apron was bespeckled with grease spots from the chicken she was frying, and if the god-damn milkman didn’t get here soon the casserole would be ruined. 

A clock ticked away in her head, half an hour for baking, fresh apron already waiting on the table, forty-five minutes left till dinnertime.

Lor had been running a tight ship until Bets stopped by and gossiped endlessly about whose husband was getting promoted and which wives were showing and the damn milkman’s replacement that she couldn’t believe Lor hadn’t noticed. The headlines on the newspaper were screaming about another murder. Betsy has a thousand lurid guesses on what had happened to the women, so gleeful in her macabre imaginings. If Lor had to estimate what occupied more of Bets’ brain- the milkman or murder, she’d be hard-pressed to pick one. The tone of Bets’ voice was causing a headache to scratch through the mindless Mnn-hmmn’s she’d been placating her guest with, and for a split second she considered bashing Bets’ head in with the skillet.

Despite the disdain for gossip,Lor knew men’s bodies had been turning up all over base, blood splashing across the enlisted and upper echelons alike. They never find the women, but the worst is anticipated. There’s a shiver in that, the not knowing. A half-formed wish coats the tip of Lor’s tongue, bitter and hateful. She swallows it like medicine.

She managed to bustle Bets out the door an hour back and now regrets the timing. Bets had probably trapped the poor milkman as he was late. The timer was going off in Lor’s head and her upper lip began to sweat as she twisted the white linen dishcloth in her hands, marring the creased perfection of it. Fingers tingling for a cigarette, Lor watches the road, the turn about a quarter mile up, wishing for milk to arrive before she comes apart at the seams. 

She’s stuck here, this house at the end of the lane, too close to the river and the swamp, and too far away from everyone else. A white gone to grey bastion was a little larger than most base housing, with a little porch that wrapped around- almost an apology for the location. It leaned a little like a man getting comfortable. John told her it was a little lonely, just like she was. That’s why he’d picked it. But even the sand here was wrong, too grainy and brown with mud.

Lor looks out at the rain, the mud of everything that carries that loamy smell that crinkles her nose, and aches for Hawaii. For home. The ocean there seems so much bigger, the clean deep smell of it -you could get lost in it. Even with the beaches closed after the ships sank, even with the shorelines dotted with wreckage, it was still her favorite place to walk. Forever in a grain of sand she thinks to herself with a smile. The heat was sultry there instead of sweltering and she hadn’t had to wave off mosquitos the size of horses. None of her clothes made sense anymore, the hot orange and palm leaves withering under the pressed navy of North Carolina’s Marine wives. She missed her father’s bees, the drone sound of them making honey that her brother gathered, even after he’d joined up. She wondered who gathered it now that he slept forever in the bottom of one of those ships dotting the coastline. It still made her heart wrench, thinking of her brother -hands wrapped around doors that would never open. She looks away from the water with a curling stomach, maybe the distance is best after all. The heat feels like John’s arms around her, suffocating, and a chill works its way in. 

Dean

In the cab of the too white truck, Dean’s looking at the picture again. The logo splashed across the side advertised friendly dairy service with a smiling cow that he thinks about punching sometimes. 

The picture beckons and a buzzing sound starts up, white noise thru the pines. The victory curls are still perfect, the honey blonde still gleams, even in black and white. The red of her lipstick makes something in his headache, he rubs the scar the bullet had traced into the side of his skull. Worrying over it. The last house had taken too long, and he always saved the best for last. The jars were clinking merrily along, setting his teeth on edge before he smooths it over and forcibly unclenches his jaw. The unblemished white of the milk rolls up around the lid from the unbalance of weight as he hefts it out of the truck.

He wonders if she’ll talk to him today, the honey blonde that lives in the Baba Yaga house. The stems it rests on always looked like chicken feet to him. They always want to talk to him, a nice boy from Kansas, square jawed Midwest perfection. Even overseas they called him Quarterback, Hollywood. He looked like what people dreamed up for Middle America. That smile rests less easily on his face after the war, but the scar was more dashing than dastardly. Depending on the company.

Chatty Cathys. Everyone but her.

Gilded in gold, hair to skin to eyes, she was a Midas warning, a parable made flesh. Something up on a pedestal in a church, but warm as a tear. He thought of Jo’s cool marble brow, rubbed the picture again before tucking it away. She meets him at the door this time, and it startles him enough to lose his rhythm. The idea to coax her out from the side porch evaporates, the company smile on his face when he asks after a towel to help with the damp the rain left. But those eyes were gold coins now, hard and remote, it makes the mask peel back a little. The shake in her hand doesn’t make any sense, she snatches the bottle from him like she knows what he is, the milk halfway to butter before she was through the door. The screen slams shut but the heavy wood stays open, so he ventures over the threshold, the overwhelming monochromatic chalk of the kitchen and table- down to porcelain mixing bowls, sets something buzzing under his skin again, only watching her bustle about the kitchen like her ass was on fire brings him to the forefront. 

A thought so sly and bloody crosses his mind, hands sweaty with the threat of discovery. She knows, the darkness whispers. She can smell the blood on you even now Winchester. In this clean room, this sanitized expanse of snow-white blankness, its casts too much light on things. It’s too bright, makes him check his fingernails and the cracks in his hands. Dean pushes it down, that dark half that got him through the war. He rubs his forehead against the buzzing that tap dances through his skull. 

“Towel?” He queries, apologetic and charming. There’s a smile but it’s still too many teeth. Cut too much with longing.

She gestures toward the white linen draped over the back of a chair, and for a moment Dean sees it splashed with blood, the snow in France liberally sprinkled with gore. A flash and it’s gone. Knuckles blanching against the back of the chair, he just watches her. The tan of her arms, the hurried knot in her apron, a wisp of hair that’s escaped from a bottom roll. His hand reaches out to tuck it back in and he snaps it back with a ferocity that makes his fingers tingle. Flexes that hand like he could shake off the reaction.

Lor startles when she realizes he’s still there, it’s just a widening of the eyes, a small flinch, but she knows Dean sees it. Everything’s coming together now, John’s due home and not a step out of place.

“So, I think you’re the only one on the block who is a mystery.” He eases the words out like she’s a spooked horse. He sits in the chair, aware of how small she is, trying to set her more at ease. He finally picks up the towel and rubs it through the gathering wet of his hair, stopping the trickle under his collar he thought her eyes would follow but didn’t. The rain’s let up now and it’s too quiet in the warm kitchen. Even with that white apron blotting it out, the green dress with red flowers seems to jump out at him, the spicy green alive against her skin especially against the grey of North Carolina’s perpetual rain.

“Not that interesting. Just another housewife.” She’s learned to make herself small and puts on her blandest face. In the unbroken white of the kitchen she blazes up, too saturated, too real. 

He fingers the edge of her dress and it’s almost obscene and innocent at the same time- so much so it freezes her.

“No one who could wear a dress like this could be boring.” The red is so bright- the flowers bleeding- attractive and repulsive in the same measure. “A tropical flower blooming in the swamp.”

“Nothing grows here right.” She thinks of her little garden. Of all the failed attempts to coax things out of the earth when her body had failed the same.

“Well, now, sometimes it takes a fresh perspective. I’ve a hand at growing things.” Dean exhales at the thought of putting things in the ground that weren’t secrets.

Lor

They talk until the casserole is out of the oven and the suns dipped below the sweeping trees. Deans got a thousand stories that don’t ache for once, and he’s so naturally charming that its smooth. Lor thinks about all the awkward silences between her and people on base, of John’s disappointed sigh at her stilted conversation and smiles. Night music of crickets and the low hum of the Neuse River starts up as they split a cigarette on the porch in the red glow. John doesn’t show up, there’s a plate wrapped up judging her but she ignores that stare of the empty chair behind the plate and briefly thinks about where John goes that makes the perfect dinner she never seems to be able to make. Nerves had her skipping her portion too, until she realizes it’s one of those nights and Johns not coming back. That sour waiting pit in her stomach loosens a little. 

Lor thinks this is the longest she’s talked to anyone that wasn’t related to her. And he really listened, do you know how rare that is anymore? He remembers the things she says, asks questions about the bees and textures and sounds that fill in sensory gaps of her past. It’s so easy really, there’s a flow between them and even though she keeps watching the lane for John, it’s more a habit than worry now. Part of her doesn’t care if he sees and that's surprising. It’s been so long since she’d been brave.

The streetlights are coming on in the distance and her own trying to flicker to life startles Lor out of the reverie Deans built.

“You better get on before the neighbors start talkin’,” she sighs. 

There’s a reluctance to her request, she’s so comfortable in her own skin right now she doesn’t want to let go of that feeling. The stories had rolled out of her like the tide, her father and brother coming alive under the sun of him. She can almost feel the sand between her toes and the years roll back to before. She hasn’t heard a scratching sound in hours. 

Dean

Dean lets himself out after an awkward hesitation, it feels like they should acknowledge it, but hugging is out of the question. He gathers up her empties and heads to the truck, looking back to see her silhouette blacked out against the door, the porch light blanching out everything else like the afterburn of a camera flash. He wonders how long that porch light will be on in his head, illuminating the space around her without touching, just like he can’t. 

The next few weeks fly by, even with the heat that lingers and clogs up the inside of the house. Dean always saves her for last and they talk or play rummy until Lor rushes him out before John gets home. 

There are days when she wears long sleeves despite the heat, and days when the makeup is a little too thick and Dean notices but he’s too polite to say anything, but it starts the buzzing up in his head again. Not all marriages are happy all the time. Dean knows that too well. He sets traps for mice that he never catches but freshens the bait every few days anyway when Lor asks. 

They go for walks sometimes, out in the woods along the river. There’s a clearing there where it meets the sea like a lover and Dean decides he’s going to build her an apiary here, a little bit of home she can tend. It cuts into his night work, but it’s not the end of the world.

It takes weeks, weeks full of sweat and research and thankless redoing of things he’d gotten wrong. Then there’s the stings, even though the netting he bought, trying to catch a swarm and relocate them and he wonders of he’s finally gone full fucking nuts chasing god damn bees down. The sound is too close to his internal screaming, but he perseveres and hopes it works as a sort of built immunity. It’s worth it to see her face light up when it’s all done. His heart almost stops when she walks up to them unafraid, but they part for her without incident and Dean thinks he’s seen the last bit of real magic left in the world while something in his chest trips up.

She gives him honey he doesn’t eat, just collects the jars on a shelf above his bed. Too sweet, too cloying, it leaves a rancid taste in his mouth he equates with bad intentions. The taste of that honey makes him feel guilty, it makes him think of her skin- wonders at the flavor. She slips flowers inside, frozen in amber like a trophy, something Dean understands. He feels like he’s drowning in her, trapped like those flowers, feels like the bad guy. Those long nights in the dark are as divorced from this daylight self as he is from Jo. He thinks about wanting to destroy something beautiful, the wrecked shape of Jo’s nose and the pressed in purple necklace he’d given her when he found out what she’d been up to when he’d been not dying for his country. Somewhere in a perfect Kansas sunflower field, his brother is fucking his ex-wife.

Dean gets letters from them sometimes, asking him to come home, forgive them. Dean thinks about how he ‘forgives’ Sam every night in a million bloody ways, shudders at the thought of his two lives converging. About blood arching across a pristine wall, snaking out through grass, dribbling through broken teeth. It’s almost calming, the kaleidoscope of all the death he’s seen, brought about. Like exhaling a long-held breath. That kind of death doesn’t belong here, next to the jars that almost glow with tawny goodness. But trophies belong together, despite their intrinsic differences.

He thinks it would’ve been easier on everyone if that bullet had run a straighter course right through his fucking skull. He fingers the scar there, there’s a chill where things go numb where the nerves died out of compassion. Everything’s ready to come out of his skin, and he wants Lor to shove it back in the box it lives in when she’s around. Where he can be the good guy again. 

Everything almost unravels one night, Dean knows he shouldn’t go to the beach near their spot, even if he needs to wash away his sins in the surf. He’s covered in that dusty iron scent, stinks like fear and worse and there’s a kind of terrible glee he wants to drown in the ocean. The moon’s barely looking at him but when he sees a woman walking on the beach, he wishes the moon would hide its face more. He fingers the blade he can’t let go of, teases the idea of breaking his rules. They’re made of paper anyway. Mistakes have been made before. His legs are pushing against the waves when he realizes its Lor and the shock of that is enough to send him slinking back down in the indigo camouflage. He’s the dark Icarus that flew too close to the sun and now he’s going to pay for it. 

But she’s seen something now. She rushes toward him like a lover, like she’s seen the face of God. It shames him, the pure unadulterated love on her face. It shrivels up the enjoyment he’d taken over the night’s glory. 

“Ben!” Lor calls into the night. “Ben come back!” She wades into the water after Dean’s retreat. Dean shrinks back into the tide, hiding from the desperation in her voice. He swims out deeper than he ever has, running from the woman he wants to run to. He’s miles away from where he started when he finally manages to crawl out and Lors voice haunts him even long after its gone quiet. 

He keeps it easy, even though he’s fraying along the edges fearing discovery, he can’t bear to lose her. He goes to her house every day and replaces bottles and gives her fresh clean white milk to use and he hates the way it looks against the glass; hates the way it looks like something unblemished and fine. 

When she doesn’t answer the door, he knows. He wants to rip through the screen, pound his fists against that oak until she answers, but he doesn’t. That edge isn’t for her. It would look too much like blame. On the third day she doesn’t answer he heads round to the back and talks through the kitchen door, “Might as well let me have a look at you.”

Her face is destroyed. There’s one eye that is open enough to see, but not by much and there’s a tear running out of it. Just the one, like she doesn’t have much to spare. Dean decides then that his night work and his daylit life are going to collide. It was only a matter of time; he’d put it off so long to keep her just a while longer.

“Don’t worry so much.” Lor cups his face, gentle- like he’s the one that needs to comfort. The cut on her lip splits open and makes the grin that crawls out from under it macabre. “It’ll be better now; he’ll be happy now.” She guides Dean’s hand to her lower stomach and goes incandescent. “I’m happy now.” There’s a flash in her mind, imagining Dean as the father, the tidal wave of almost and excitement supernovaing ten thousand times more than what she has, but she’s content. Stuffs it down to the places where childhood wishes die.

Dean’s face has something near pity, and it fills her with a rage she didn’t know she still had. Whirling out of his grip, she straightens her spine, “Get out.”

“Lor…” He reaches for her like he can pet this away. Everybody keeps wanting to smooth her out like a sheet.

“It’s Lorelei.” Oh, and that cuts him to the bone. “Get out Dean. He’s coming home early today for my surprise and god knows he’s had enough with the gossip. Why do you think he’s been at me like this? Fucking milkman hanging out here all the time. Ain’t right.” Her voice drops a few octaves, mirroring Johns without her noticing.

“He’s not a good guy Lorelei.” He’s got that adult tone now, like she’s crazy, like she needs sense talked into. Lor reels from it, that patronizing hands out Jesus approach. They’d had that when they’d tried to take her away after Ben died. Ben, her baby brother, her everything. She thinks about swimming out to that wreck, almost drowning against the metal of the hull where she could still hear the men trying to scratch their way out. Part of her stayed there, died with Ben in that steel coffin. Thinks about her father trying to keep her and Ben away from the ocean, warnings of selkies and the people of the waves come to take them back. About how her father never really grieved Ben. Would leave clothes out for him every night like he’d swim back up to the house and pop in for dinner. That lonely lantern hung outside the door every night followed her even to New Bern. 

He starts to rub the picture inside his pocket, a charm against the buzzing he hears as his temper kicks up.

“I chose him. He picked me up after my brother, pieced me back together again. He’s not the worst. It can always be worse Dean.” Her arms are crossed, shutting him out and the buzzing picks up, too close.

“Just because he’s not the worst guy doesn’t make him the right guy.” He tamps down on the bees inside his head and tries to reason with her. “I can help you, get you away…”

“And you’re the right guy?” she snorts even though there’s a pang there under her ribs. Cutting a guitar string, a lifeline. “You think I don’t know how you look at me sometimes, when you think I can’t see? What you all look at me like? Would we be friends if you didn’t want to fuck me Dean?”

That backs him right out of the house, enough of the truth to slap at him. He looks at the door long after she slams it. He’d dropped the picture in surprise, beat on the door to try to get it back, but she’s deaf now, at least to him. He shakes a little without his talisman, reaches for his pocket for comfort again before he curses anew.

Well, he’ll be back tonight anyway.

Lor picks up the scrap of paper she always sees him fondling, a new tear tracking down her face at the way things have just ended. It’s blank, a picture rubbed raw and pulpy, only the backing holding it together. She wonders whose picture it was.

That night Dean packs his tools and drives out to the swamp, taking the long way round to the house. There’s music in the night, the hot hunter green of it, things moving around in the brush that sleep during the day. Crickets are the choir that some find their god to. Hymns are the wet cut of flesh, the hammer strikes against bone. He baptizes them in blood and pretends like its forgiveness, that its justice. A dark confessional where sins come home to roost. 

He worries at the crowbar, tries to plan his way around hurting Lor even if he’s pissed as a hornet’s nest at her. There’s a sedative he’s got all ready, medic training from the Marines and light fingers provided long after he’s been done traversing most of Europe. He wants to use his hands this time, more personal than he’s ever been. Show Lor what monsters look like, break the tarnished silver and gold chain between them so finally that it takes on his end. He almost reroutes to avoid their place, avoid the bees when the buzzing already gone deafening in his head, but Fuck it shrugs his way out of his shoulders. It’ll be quicker and man, is he eager to get started. The sunlit mask falls away and the man who spent years making war crawls out, something he should have left in the mud in France. Something that likes the dark, the easy slide of knife through flesh, the fresh snap of bone. It’s a separate peace, this duality; they meet with the sunrise when he puts the women on trains unconscious. They never know what happened, he saves them from that. From their own war, from the men that came back. 

He avoids the hive at the last minute, circles to the house. There are too many lights on and the screen doors half hanging off the hinges. A panic he hasn’t felt in years builds up in his lungs, making them tight and frail. The kitchens covered in broken things, ruined the slide of milk white. Dinners on the wall and someone’s been redecorating in red one drip at a time. There’s a small amount of relief to that, that white of bandages and unspoiled things receding back. They’re both ruined now. Lor doesn’t belong in that house any more than he belongs in the milk truck. White is just the lies they tell, the masks they wear. Dean starts tracking them then, one broken piece of ground at a time until he realizes where they’re headed. 

A laugh rolls up out of the dark, hysterical and strange. It unsettles him enough to drop the crowbar, but he manages to keep the bag slung up on one shoulder, even if it is a bit unbalanced. When he comes upon the clearing with the apiary, everything is so wrong he cannot see it right for a moment, it scrambles his brain. The hives are destroyed, and Lor’s standing over someone he thinks is John and the laugh that’s ripping out of her sounds unhinged enough for Dean to recoil a bit inside. It’s unreal, cold moonlight spilling and the scent of blood and honey in the air. There’s a strap that’s torn on Lor’s dress and it hangs open down the back where it’s streaked with mud made of struggle. Her hair fully down and snarled about her head. A wet snapping sound lures Dean closer in fascination, the music of the night work Lor seems to be doing draws him in like a siren song.

The bees are circling around her- a halo for Queen Mab, Asteria, Medea- some dark goddess rising, covered in blood and honey where only the moon can see. John’s ribs are spread eagle, his chest cavity opening like wings and the bees are settling inside their new home amidst the wreckage of the old. It’s a scene made for Gehenna, some half lit world of horror that Dean visits in his dreams and it makes his heart surge. There’s something so old testament, so resonant about those honeycombs filling up his chest cavity, the sickly sweet smell of church. It might be Dean’s new gospel, this scene that borders on some old pagan ritual. A midnight gospel, but gospel all the same. 

Like she feels him enter her circle, she whirls on him- a true Lorelei luring him out to break against the shore. He’s startled, he knows how quiet he is and Dean wonders if this is real, if this isn’t some feverish dream brought on by the madness he knows he has. He actually steps back reacting to the ferocity and crackle of her in the air along with the petrichor scent. She presses forward and he can see the gold of her eyes even in the dark, despite how wide her pupils are.

He falls to his knees, mission forgotten. He’d worship at whatever altar she wants. Her hands are coated in bloody honey, it rolls down her forearms and drips down her legs- where blood is drying between them. There’s been more than one death tonight. She cups his face and penny tinted syrup rolls down his jaw, the mellifluous slip of it sends electric zinging up his spine.

“He tried to take everything from me.” That grip intensifies to the point of pain and Dean’s pants get tighter with the force. “What are you here to take?” Her broken beautiful face hollowed out under the cast of moonlight, constellations crowning her, blood dripping from wounds tying her to the earth. He wanted to lick her clean, rip out what was left of John’s heart and feed it to her. He wants the cloying sweet and bitter salt that coats her skin to live in his mouth.

He catches the curve of her pointer finger with his tongue despite her bruising grip, and sucks the digit into his mouth. The sound of it is obscene but the honeys not too sweet now, threaded with the salt of blood and labor. She finally found the perfect flavor to suit him. She watches him, hollowed cheeks wrapped around her as he chases that taste, those green eyes gone black in the moonlight. He wants to offer her sacrifice, bloody altars in her name, rewrite the history of faith against the color of her eyes and the ocher red rolling down her skin- vengeance and fury all in one. He stays prostrate, kneeling at the foot of his new god, willing to take whatever she gives him, even if that thing is violence, is death. He sees the crook of her knife, even dulled as it is with flesh and gore. A chill of anticipation runs up his spine, fear and delight and the undercurrent of debased arousal. 

He can smell the ruddy death on her, there’s a whisper of so much more that sets off alarms in his hind brain. Dean raises his hands up, the rip in her dress has made a gap over her stomach that he rests his hands on. The touch is tentative, and unanswered question that he doesn’t want solved by the blood running down her thighs. 

“I felt the light in me go out.” Lor whispers, grief and loss making it have a raggedy edge. 

And then there’s tears and suddenly she’s human again, not some terrifying dark goddess here to raze the earth. It shakes Dean free from himself, he can feel his feet again. 

“He told me that Ben was gone, that I didn’t hear the scratching, but I did. I know he was still alive down there the same way I knew this baby grew in me. And I hated John and loved him, and he gave me this just to realize that it wasn’t about him, so it wasn’t allowed to live. Ben was in his way. Now the baby. He wanted me to have nothing. So I made him nothing.“

“Well, at least now, he’s useful.”

Lor’s eyes find the bag of night work tools he’s brought and she kneels down and fingers the collection of knives and blunt instruments spilling out, her fingers linger over them in a type of reverence before things are clicking into place.

“You just beat me to it darlin.”

She looks ready to grieve again, the small candlelight of her going out. She stands again, that remote Kali, some moonlit dark angel that cannot be touched. She reaches into what is left of her pocket and flips a piece of paper at him. The rain is coming down harder now, rinsing the proof of violence from her.

Dean looks into Jo’s face, rubs it. Water drops are washing the image away until he realizes it’s blank. Has been. The only thing that made this a photo was wishes. Kind of like the things that make him a man.

“You came here for me too. Came to be butcher and husband too?’ Her knife glints again, the wet making it fresh- sharp and gleaming. “What do you do with them?” she almost sounds bored and it makes his dick go harder. 

“I put them on a train.” Do we? the dark half asks. He shakes it off and goes on, “They deserve a new life. I can’t unhit my wife. I can’t kill my brother. I can’t go back in time and not join the Marines, leaving them with only each other for comfort. So, I do this. It’s my purpose. My penance.”

“You gonna put me on a train Dean?” it’s almost playful now, those predator teeth flashing a smile. She eyes the front of his pants where she can tell he’s interested. “I’m not laying down for the Father, not ever again.” Her knife curves up and out as she points at him. 

“Well I thought you’d like it better on top, eventually.” He grins his own vicious smile and they are in sync again, her bees canceling out both of their white noise, both of their monsters in the dark gone quiet. 

He risks standing, goes over to where she’s backed up and picks her up unironically in bridal style. He walks all the way out to where the river meets the ocean and even though it’s the wrong one, something in her sighs and loosens. He walks with her right into the surf and tucks her around him like he’s her anchor in this unfamiliar shore, the waves work on erasing the night from their skin and he holds her until they’re both clean again. Well as clean as any two people like them can be. He doesn’t know if her eyes really do grow sharper, or if her teeth seem to widen into points, but he knows the low dark plays tricks. She feels colder now than she ever has. He thinks about legends and real monsters and shudders a little against her. 

“I’ll take you back there, to the island you love. To the warm and green. Back to Ben. I’ll stay if you’ll still have me knowing what type of man I am.” If I’m even a man at all anymore.

“Exactly who you needed to be Dean. That’s the type of man you are. Exactly who I needed you to be too.”

She walks out into deeper waters and Dean follows. He’ll follow her anywhere. She beckons him into the black, where the light can’t reach, and he follows her, like a song.

When the water closes over his head, he’s smiling.


End file.
